Frame by Frame

Posts Tagged ‘Ted Hartley’

As the website notes of this unproduced gem — and it really is a great script — “buried deep among the hundreds of old scripts in RKO Pictures’ archives was a 1941 melodramatic gem about an amnesia-stricken man who wakes up in the middle of a revolution in Mexico. Never produced, the screenplay for The Way to Santiago is credited to Orson Welles. A quick look at the text leaves no doubt it was the work of the Citizen Kane filmmaker when he was at the peak of his arrogant brilliance. The script begins: ‘My face fills the frame.’

Abandoned by RKO after Welles’ epic fall from grace, The Way to Santiago has finally gotten the green light nearly six decades later and is being produced by a rejuvenated RKO. ‘This script caught everything about Welles,’ said RKO Chairman and CEO Ted Hartley, citing the screenplay’s action, suspense and jungle romance. ‘It reflected his greatness in storytelling.’ The Welles script was known to film historians for years, but it wasn’t easy to find.

Santiago tells the story of a man who wakes up in Mexico with no idea of who he is or how he got there. The twist is that he has an uncanny resemblance to a notorious figure. The story follows the man’s search for his own identity while evil forces try to kill him. Welles intended to direct and star in the film, as he had done in Kane, so the name of the main character is simply ‘Me’ in the script.

In a letter on file in RKO’s archives, Welles writes from New York to studio production head George Schaeffer on Feb. 2, 1941 that he’s eager to get started, assuring Schaeffer ‘we are going to successfully avoid a lot of the things that cost us time and money in the making of Kane. The only way to achieve the results we all urgently want is for those in responsibility to understand, finally, that even if they don’t like my way of doing things, they must do it my way just the same… (and most important) without making an effort to prove in the process that my way is wrong,’ Welles wrote.”

About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an internationally recognized scholar and writer of film history, theory and criticism. He is the author of thirty books and more than 100 articles on film, and appears regularly in national media outlets discussing film and culture trends. Frame by Frame is a collection of his thoughts on a number of those topics. To contact Prof. Dixon for an interview, reach him at 402.472.6064 or wdixon1@unl.edu. Visit him at his website, wheelerwinstondixon.com